[johngalt007]

I had bought an Asrock ION 330 a few years ago and it used to work flawlessly until I upgraded to Eden. Now, there are a lot of frame drops and the performance while playing any video media from Samba shares on local wired LAN or from youtube is very unsatisfying.

I would like to replace my existing hardware with preferably a set top box costing less than $350-400 with similar form factor as Asrock ION 330 that can handle all 1080p content and playing from youtube flawlessly. My 42'' 1080p Vizio TV has a VGA port through which I connect my current hardware. The VGA port supports a reduced resolution of 1366x768 only, but I don't use HDMI port on TV for this purpose as connecting a pc through HDMI renders text on the screen unreadable. So, I would prefer a VGA port on the machine. I will install XBMCbuntu.

If such a hardware does not exist, I could conceivably put together a machine myself, but I would prefer not to due to lack of free time.

What do you recommend?

Thanks.

JG

[Jönke]

Before you give up, try Openelec http://openelec.tv/get-openelec

[johngalt007]

Thanks for the openelec recommendation. Will try it. But I would still like to get some hardware recommendations as I plan to dual boot machine with windows 8. XBMC will run from Linux live version.